Richard Curt Kraus
Brushes with Power: Modern Politics and the Chinese Art of
Calligraphy
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) pp.
132-135

THE TIANANMEN POEMS

Premier Zhou Enlai had died in January [1976]. On April 5,
China's traditional festival for cleaning graves, two hundred
thousand people demonstrated in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
Ostensibly mourning Zhou Enlai, the demonstrators were in fact
protesting the power of Jiang Qing and her associates. (18) When
the crowd refused to disperse at the
end of the day, the scene grew ugly - a mob smashed several
vehicles and burned a police command post. At night, militia and
public security forces, under the control of Hua Guofeng, cleared
the square. Many demonstrators were beaten - others were
arrested. The following morning, the Party Political Bureau
declared the incident to be "counterrevolutionary" and removed
Deng Xiaoping from all offices as its ultimate instigator. At the
same time Hua Guofeng was appointed premier and vice-chairman of
the Party.

But after Mao died in September and the "Gang of Four" was
arrested in October, China's politics moved slowly but steadily
to the right. As figures disgraced during the Cultural Revolution
regained respectability and influence, support for Deng Xiaoping
mounted. Deng was reinstated in 1977 and expanded his influence
by promising to end mass campaigns and to pay more attention to
intellectuals than to activists and workers. This protracted
political battle was fought in the Party's Political Bureau,
where the left saw its power shrink during 1977 and 1978. As Hua
Guofeng was dependent upon the surviving, non-Gang left, his own
position became precarious, especially when his fellow triumvir
and head of the Zhongnanhai security force, Wang Dongxing, came
under fire for corruption.

Deng Xiaoping's victory in this struggle was tied to the Party's
judgment of the 1976 Tiananmen incident. Deng pressed
relentlessly for a reversal of the Party's verdict, arguing that
the demonstration in fact had been "revolutionary." By
implication, anyone involved in its suppression had committed a
grave error. A reversal would be a fatal blow to the authority of
Hua Guofeng, former minister of public security.

Many of the 1976 demonstrators had written poems that they
posted in Tiananmen Square. Students from Beijing's Number Two
Foreign Language Institute, a school with close ties to Deng
Xiaoping, edited over one thousand of these poems and published
them in four unofficial mimeographed editions. These began to
circulate shortly after the fall of the "Gang of Four,"
constituting an open provocation to Hua Guofeng. Police from the
public security forces searched for some of the pseudonymous or
anonymous authors, but not very effectively. In some cases the
police revealed the poets' identities not to Hua Guofeng but to
the student editors. (19) The most famous poem was by a high
school student, Wang Juntao:

In my grief I hear demons shriek;
I weep while wolves and jackals laugh.
Though tears I shed to mourn a hero,
With head raised high, I draw my sword . (20)

As pressure mounted to reverse the verdict on the Tiananmen
incident, so did demands for the open publication of these poems,
no matter how embarrassing they might be to Hua Guofeng. Hua's
enemies struck in the second half of August 1979, while he was
visiting Yugoslavia and Iran. Their opportunity came with the
revival of the monthly magazine
Chinese Youth
, which had not appeared since the Cultural Revolution.
Chinese Youth
was under the control of a faction loyal to Hu Yaobang, former
head of the Youth League and Deng Xiaoping's lieutenant. He was
later rewarded with the Party leadership. When the magazine
reappeared on September 11, the cover pictured Hua Guofeng with a
group of young people, but inside was a selection of the
Tiananmen poems.

Zhang Pinghua, Hua's image manager and head of the Party
Propaganda Department, was caught by surprise. Zhang quickly
ordered the recall of all copies of
Chinese Youth
, reissuing it a few
days later with new pages loosely inserted into each copy. These
included an inscription for the magazine by Hua Guofeng and a
1957 photo of Mao Zedong surrounded by young people. (21) Hua
Guofeng's insert was written with a fountain pen (unusual for
Hua) and rather poorly, as if in haste. It contrasted sharply
with the formal, traditional inscriptions by Mao Zedong, Ye
Jianying, and Nie Rongzhen that had been bound conventionally
into the rest of the magazine and listed in the table of
contents. (22) The Mao photo was apparently an effort to distract
readers' attention from the embarrassingly unorthodox insert.

With this inscription, Hua Guofeng attempted to co-opt the
inevitable publication of the Tiananmen poems, making it appear
as if they had appeared under his patronage instead of against
his will. The Party announced its new verdict on the Tiananmen
demonstration on November 21, 1978. (23) Ten days before, Hua had
sought to lessen the damage by writing the title for an official
book of the Tiananmen poems, but he pointedly omitted the second
word of its original title,
Tiananmen Revolutionary Poems
. (24) Wall posters soon appeared in Beijing demanding that the
title for this volume be written by Deng Xiaoping instead. (25)

Hua Guofeng's cynical calligraphy was as ineffectual as his
other political maneuvering. Throughout the fall of 1979 his
major allies were driven from power. Wu De, head of the Beijing
Party, lost his post in October; big- character posters
criticized Wang Dongxing, head of the Zhongnanhai guard, PLA Unit
8341. Ye Jianying deserted Wang Dongxing and Hua Guofeng, his
former coconspirators, throwing his support to Deng Xiaoping. In
December 1978, the Third Plenum of the Party's Eleventh Central
Committee dismissed Wu De, Wang Dongxing, and two other key
leftist leaders from the Political Bureau, isolating a weakened
Chairman Hua Guofeng.

[For more about the relationship between calligraphy, politics,
and power in China, see additional excerpts from
Brushes with Power
.]

Richard Curt Kraus,
Brushes with Power: Modern Politics and the Chinese Art of
Calligraphy
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)
(c) 1991 The Regents of the University of California. All Rights
Reserved.